Top 100 Public Library Sayings
#1. Don't forget to support your public library.
Bob Dylan
#3. The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.
Herman Wouk
#4. If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.
Peter Singer
#5. I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
Barbara Kingsolver
#6. Get that Property Of Whitford Public Library stamp and stamp it right on his forehead. Then cross out the library's name and write yours
Shannon Stacey
#7. For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books.
Avi
#8. The public library building, in my view, is just a little lower than the church, the cathedral, the temple, the synagogue and the mosque. Within those walls and along those stacks, I have found security and assurance.
Maya Angelou
#9. The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.
Josh Hanagarne
#10. When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.
Michael Dirda
#11. All you need in life is truth and beauty and you can find both at the Public Library.
Studs Terkel
#12. We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories.
John Sladek
#13. I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves
you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
#14. The public library is a center of public happiness first, of public education next.
John Cotton Dana
#15. When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.
Keith Richards
#16. My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.
Cynthia Ozick
#17. Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there ...
Barbara Pym
#18. Access to the public library should be a basic human right.
Kaitlyn Dunnett
#19. I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.
Clyde Tombaugh
#20. My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.
Dave Morris
#21. I want to know how the hell you managed to locate that hideout using the damn public library.
Richard Castle
#22. The public library is where place and possibility meet.
Stuart Dybek
#23. You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
Matt Damon
#24. I've seen the most remarkable thing. It's in the New York Public Library. They've got the original typescript of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - all four acts of it.
Peter Shaffer
#25. I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
#26. A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.
[Letter to the Millicent (Rogers) Library, February 22, 1894]
Mark Twain
#27. I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
Bruce Feiler
#28. The public library my parents took me to in Fort Worth had the children's section next to the SF/F section, so I was reading adult SF/F at a very young age.
Martha Wells
#29. The public library system of the United States is worth preserving.
Henry Rollins
#30. For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
Pete Hamill
#32. I think the New York Public Library is so, so amazing. It's literally the coolest place - It's good shelter from the sun and it's the most beautiful building. It's really, really fun.
Natalie Portman
#33. Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.
Ali Smith
#34. The New York Public Library is a wonderful gem. I go there to get away from the bustle of the city. They have an incredible collection of menus from all over the city.
Daniel Humm
#35. We moved from the East coast to the town of Spokane, Washington, when I was about 13 years old, and I did not adapt very well to the, to the style of the place, and I spent most of my time in the public library.
Irwin Rose
#36. Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.
Alan Bennett
#37. On my first visit to the public library, I was like a kid at a candy store where all the candy was free.
I gorged myself until my tummy ached.
Craig Thompson
#38. It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to girls and boys who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it as the founding of a public library.
Andrew Carnegie
#39. With a public library card in your hand, you have access to the Internet and a world of opportunities.
Bill Gates
#40. Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.
Leo Tolstoy
#41. I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn't have a similar story to mine - transformation through the public library.
Karin Slaughter
#42. It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.
Nell Zink
#43. As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn't even list 'homosexuality' as a topic.
James McGreevey
#44. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
Andrew Wiles
#45. Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.
Douglas Adams
#46. The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them.
Rachel Cohen
#47. On a grander scale, the New York Public library - and in fact the entire U.S. Library system - was founded and funded by those who relentlessly pursued money.
Mike Cernovich
#48. Why can't I just Google it like everything else?! I hate you public library system!
Vera Brosgol
#49. I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.
[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]
Patrick Ness
#50. I moved to New York City in '92 and had no money. I had a lot of free time, as actors do. I would go to the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
Denis O'Hare
#51. My heart skips a beat. Seriously, like a CD from the public library, it goes ZZebbTTT and skips.
Brent Crawford
#52. Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal.
Woody Allen
#53. I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.
Amy Bloom
#54. In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.
George Weah
#55. I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.
Mark Ruffalo
#56. Life in a small town is like an intricately plotted novel, and even though I had read every book in the public library by the time I was fourteen, I found the real people around me saying and doing far more interesting things than did the imaginary book characters.
Maxine Cheshire
#57. As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry
Joyce Carol Oates
#58. We take it into account from the very beginning and try to steer couples toward items that lend themselves to those circumstances. Sometimes we have to steer a little more forcefully - you can't fry French fries in the New York Public Library.
David Castle
#59. The public library is the most dangerous place in town
John Ciardi
#60. [T]he public library is where those without money, power, access, university affiliation, or advanced degrees can get information for free..
Siva Vaidhyanathan
#61. Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
Alberto Manguel
#63. From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream.
Julia Glass
#64. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett
Samuel Beckett
#65. Your mother goes to the public library, which has been down on its luck for a long time, like most things around here. Last time she brought back a copy of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine that was worn ragged, all held together with tape. She just sank into it, though, she just melted into it.
Marilynne Robinson
#66. I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.
Pat Barker
#67. The institution of a public library, containing books on education, would be well adapted for the information of teachers, many of whom are not able to purchase expensive publications on those subjects.
Joseph Lancaster
#68. I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
Charles Kuralt
#69. Let's go downtown," Dad said. "By the public library. You never know what wild and crazy things might be happening at the library.
Marion Jensen
#70. It is a great tool of dictators and tyrants, who want to get masses of people to do what they want, to make sure there are no libraries...The fact that there was no public library in Rwanda is one reason why genocide was possible.
Stephen Kinzer
#71. Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1
Zadie Smith
#72. Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.
Karl Schroeder
#73. I think you should read everything you can. In my case, by the age of 10, I'd read every book in the Omaha public library about investing, some twice.
You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense.
Warren Buffett
#74. Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.
Jill Lepore
#75. First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.
Charles Bukowski
#76. Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.
Jerzy Kosinski
#77. You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.
Clay Shirky
#78. I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library, the main branch. I was one of those people. If you ever spend a good amount of time there, you realize there are people who spend the entire day there. They're bookish homeless people.
Lisa Yuskavage
#79. No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
Samuel Johnson
#80. In my opinion, right up there with free public schools, our free public library system is what makes citizenship possible, even what makes America great.
Karen DeCrow
#81. My most prized possession was my library card from the Oakland Public Library.
Bill Russell
#82. The theater should be free to the people just as the Public Library is free, just as the museum is free ... I want the theater to be made accessible to the people.
Eva Le Gallienne
#83. The great white lions from the steps of the Public Library leaped together and threw themselves upon the iron steed and its dark rider. For
Diane Duane
#84. One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..
Bell Hooks
#85. There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
Andrew Carnegie
#86. A family living at the poverty level is unlikely to be able to afford a computer at home. Even with a computer, access to the Internet is another significant expense. A child might borrow a book from a public library; but it is not possible to take a computer home.
Margaret Geller
#87. Sure." Olivia smirked. "Good ol' New York Public Library. I'm sure it's up to date on the latest Demons that escape through well-guarded Demon Gates.
Cheyenne McCray
#88. My first book, 'Contest,' had a guy fighting aliens in the New York Public Library. The second book, 'Ice Station,' and 'Temple' were present-day military thrillers.
Matthew Reilly
#89. I was looking at books and reading the indexes and finding a next book and reading that book, and then from that index ... It was a version of surfing the internet before the internet. I was surfing the New York Public Library. It was back when you had to fill out a form and put it in a chute.
Lisa Yuskavage
#90. I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
Jose Saramago
#91. A zoo is a cultural institution. Like a public library, like a museum, it is at the service of popular education and science. And by that token, not much of a money-making venture for the Greater Good and the Greater Profit are not compatible aims.
Yann Martel
#92. The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library.
John Fowles
#93. I always carry a pistol when I go [to the New York Public Library]. Never did trust those stone lions.
Robert Bloch
#94. Here is the treasure chest of the world - the public library, or a bookstore.
Ben Carson
#95. CHAPTER 10: For questions about librarians featured in erotic literature, you will find absolutely nothing in the public library.
Josephine Carr
#96. In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.
Daniel Quinn
#97. In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.
William Monahan
#98. We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system.
David McCullough
#99. I fell in love with books at the Elizabeth Public Library when I was four ...
Judy Blume
#100. My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
David Mamet
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